Please can anyone help - i have a sony cyber-shot-u and whilst 'playing around' with it a few moments a go i went on to the menu and somehow clicked 'ok' to format my pictures. I dont know what this means, it said that it was 'formatting' for a few seconds and now i cant find any of my pictures. Please can someone help me???

Please can anyone help - i have a sony cyber-shot-u and whilst 'playing around' with it a few moments a go i went on to the menu and somehow clicked 'ok' to format my pictures. I dont know what this means, it said that it was 'formatting' for a few seconds and now i cant find any of my pictures. Please can someone help me???

Don't panic (and don't try to do anything that's going to write to the card like trying to take more photos or running a utility not specifically designed to recover images). You'll risk losing them if you try anything that writes to the card. It's best to use a utility that is only reading from it, writing the recovered images to your PC'shard disk

Most models are only overwriting the File Allocation Table with a format, versus overwriting the images themselves.

Try Digital Image Recovery (it's free). You can download it using this link:

Jim C,
I have to tell you what a great job you do for this website. You answer questions from amatures to hobbyists, wording each one in a way they will understand. This takes time and patience. Your posts are very informative and educational, and I look forward to your responses.

Most of the time, I can reuse what I've already written about topics that come up frequently that I do respond to (and I don't take time to read all of the threads).

You'll find lots of other forum members here that do the same thing (try to answer questions that they may know some answers to). I certainly have a lot to learn in many areas.

There are a lot of very good people here that know a lot more about photography than I do, and you'll see themresponding to member questions, too. We are all still learning (never ending process), and I learn a lot from reading posts from others here.

I enjoy spending time here, as we have a good group of forum members sharing their experience and opinions. Of course, anyopinion you see here is likely to biased, including mine. ;-)